Today started with an adventure. An train ride through the countryside of rural Maryland. It started a few weeks back when we went looking for fall foliage train rides and located a few in Maryland. We decided to try the Walkersville Southern Railroad for our first ride. It was closer to home, cheaper and didn’t require getting up as early.
And it was indeed a train ride. Through the wilds of townhome developments and backyards. We passed over a pretty creek and held up traffic across a few roads. It was a short hour-long ride up and back a single track. (Did you know trains could go forward then reverse back the same they came?) It was a short train with two open-air cars (and hard wooden benches), two indoor cars (with padded seats and windows that opened) and a caboose decorated to be used as a birthday party setting with limited (padded) seats and two small chairs up a ladder at the top of the car.
It was unusually full, I had assumed on a beautiful 70 degree day in October people used that as an excuse to take their kids on a train. But the ticket taker commented this was as full as one of their Christmas rides and it wasn’t usually this packed (there wasn’t an empty seat on the train).
Creek the train passed over.
I wish it had taken us past some actual fall foliage rather than through town, passed developments (that perhaps were trees once.) But it was a pleasant ride and not so expensive I regretted the trip.
After the ride, we walked through their small museum, and daydreamed about setting up our own elaborate country scene with model trains running through it.
Afterwards, we had some shopping to do which led to our next adventure of the day we didn’t plan.
One of the few aisles that didn’t have books lined up along each shelf on the floor.
We stumbled upon Wonder Books and Video in Frederick, Maryland. And it was far better than I could have hoped. The book shelves stretched forever with cluttered, but well-maintained stacks of every sort of books, new and old, one could hope for. There was also a huge selection of DVDs and Vinyl. There were also cassette tapes and 8-tracks. I could have easily spent all day in the store and far more money than I did.
Need colorful books to complete your shelves? Wonder has them.
From the FREE OLD BOOK SMELL sign on the door, to the friendly, helpful staff inside, may be the perfect bookstore. We have already made plans to return with a list as I have the problem of never remembering what books I’m looking to buy when I’m in a place to buy them. Beforehand, they flood my brain. Afterwards, they haunt me like apparitions of a lost opportunity. But in the moment, my brain empties, achieving a perfect meditation.
I had a man come to my door about turning the gas off to the house. I assumed he was working in the area and needed to turn it off for that. (Washington Gas had replaced our main gas line, as well as our neighbors, and dig up the street thrice looking for a leak.)
But no, he said we had not paid our bill. Confused, I said we had paid or online just a few days before. (Our last bill was about $17.) He read the amount due on our account was $1600-something.
I asked what address he had. He read the amount again. I asked the address.
“1000 Crawford Ave.”
I told him he had the wrong road. Crawford is three blocks away from here. Right house number. Wrong road.
He quickly left, presumably to show up at the correct house and deliver their bad news.
I thought of this because 1) we pay our bills online and on time. 2) We have gotten legal paperwork delivered to our house for that same address in Crawford more than once.
It’s interesting to me that neither a law firm or Washington Gas can read a map correctly enough to arrive on the correct street.
Today I went to see Dear Evan Hansen at The Kennedy Center. I purposefully didn’t look into much of what the play was about because I like going into things without reviews filling me head with pre-conceived notions of what I am about to see.
I knew it was about a kid with a cast and that was about it. I had no idea what to expect. I saw the play in The Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. While it felt small, actually seats 1164 people. We were on the main level in the very last row.
Scene from our seats at the back of the main floor.
It was my first time in the last row and I really enjoyed being able to stretch an arm behind me to seat next to me. There is no saving the knees of a 6’5″ frame in a theater, so any little bit of extra room elsewhere helps. I didn’t have to worry about blocking the view of anyone behind me which was an extra stress removed from the production.
The stage production was very interesting. They used a series of translucent screens with various images and video clips projected on to it. It reminded me of seeing Nine Inch Nails years ago. The screens put me off at first. It’s a simple play in its sets and subject and I felt the screens were infringing on the storytelling I was watching. And my stepmother made a good point about it being a sign of the times we live in. Where everything is colored by a screen. Everything we do has a glow to it.
Rarely do we sit and watch something live. It all happens on screens of different sizes.
Whether it was commentary on society or simply a way to fill a big stage without much happening in many of the scenes, it become more useful as the play progressed.
The play is dark. With the entire story built on a single lie. A lie born of good intentions, but still the basis for everything that follows. As in life, there was good to come out of the lie as well as bad. I turned to my wife at intermission as we’re riding high with our character getting everything he wanted and said, “And now it all falls apart.”
And it did.
After intermission, our character got what he deserves. His fall comes hard. But he saved a family and built something truly remarkable.
Flying orchestra above an orchard.
This is the first theater I’ve been to where the orchestra was positioned in the air above the stage rather in a pit below it. For most of the play they were behind screens and overshadowed by the visuals.
Except for the final scene where the orchard is shown and the beautiful sky is seen above it, and I giggled to myself as the floating orchestra was revealed.
Recently on a walk at a new local park, I came across a placard and place for my phone with instructions to take a picture of the area and email it. The system is from a startup called Chronolog. I had never seen anything like this on my walks through other local parks. Apparently, they’re using it to target specific areas for a variety of issues.
Chronolog sign post with bracket to take a picture that I took a picture of to remember where to email the photo later.
I like being able to do my part to help build the time lapse and give them more information about the park.
When asked about what these stations are and how they should be used, Ky Wildermuth of Chronolog said “The idea was to create stationary reference points that would position cell phone cameras in a specific direction. Park conservationist would mount brackets in front of ecosystems they needed to monitor. People who ventured out into these areas could place their phone into the bracket, take a picture, and email it to be compiled for a time lapse. That time lapse could be analyzed to track plant life, a restoration project, or environmental change.”
The email I got back in confirmation and thanks said what they were looking to monitor with this particular site.
The North Branch Rock Creek flows directly into Rock Creek and ultimately into the Potomac River. This site is a popular creek crossing. We hope to monitor bank erosion and channeling of this creek.
Unfortunately, there is not a public-facing page for the site I contributed to but here’s an example from their site of the Vernal Pool that goes from dry to wet land as the seasons change.
I have been playing Destiny since September 13, 2014 and poured 1518 hours into it. I have played Destiny 2 since September 6, 2017 and have poured 1063 hours into it so far. I say so far because I continue to play it almost daily. From a 15 minute dip into the pool to an almost 14 hour gaming session where 5 hours 55 minutes of that was our first attempt at the raid, a 6-player team-based activity.
And of course, people in the community have made apps and web sites where I can look up all this information.
Destiny is a lifestyle. It’s the only game I spend much time on. It’s where I went into battle with a real-life friend and have made so many more in the years I’ve spent chatting and shooting with them. I count my friends reaching from my home near Washington DC to the UK, Canada, Australia and those are the ones I can list off-hand.
For a couple of months, we thought about doing something with Destiny. None of us are good enough to be streamers. We’ve not Youtube stars. Nor do we aspire to be. We love playing the game and talking about it. So that’s what we’ve been doing since early last month.
It was Nitedemon’s idea to start it. He was talking about it and I was interested. No1RespawnsinRL was excited about it too. Together, we make a good trio of opinions, styles of play and what we want to get out of the game. We released our first episode on Feb 6th and have kept up a weekly pace. With an extra bonus episode mid-week once since we had a great conversation that didn’t really fit into the episode so we released it on its own. After 7 episodes and 320 downloads it’s been a blast to do and I look forward to it every week.
It’s been a fun challenge trying to work around life and schedules and a 5-hour time difference between the east coast of the US and the UK. That’s been an interesting challenge running with my clanmates from across the world as well. Trying to remember what time it is in Australia when I am online. Am I catching a buddy at the start of his day or as he’s struggling to stay awake choosing to exchange game time for rest.
It’s a niche podcast for sure. And as I tell people I’m podcasting, they ask what about, then their eyes roll as I say it’s about the video game that I play. But that’s OK. It’s not for everyone, nor should it be. We are not gaming professionals. We’re three guys talking about a video game (with occasional guests from the Fr0zen Clan. Motto: “We tried to win, but we let it go.”)
In addition to the audio podcast, we release a video version on Youtube where I take the show and put some gaming footage I’ve collected that week behind it. It’s more interesting than the static image we had up for the for few shows and since we don’t record with webcams, it would be a very dull video watching Skype icons light up when we talk.
I am a very amateur video “editor” and I have all the respect in the world for the folks who do this professionally in the gaming realm, television and on the web. It’s a ton of work! A lot fewer kids would want to grow up to be Youtube stars if they knew the hours of work behind it.
Each week we put out 60-90 minutes of show. During the week, I try to record 5-6 hours of footage that’s clean. Games where I don’t open my menu and switch armor and weapons too much. Complete matches where the game hasn’t errored out. I’m always looking for fun little moments to bookend the show with. A clip of a buddy and I using the same special attach at the same time. A couple of people dancing or doing the same emote in a group. An absolutely epic failure where I lunge off a cliff to my death. I try to find a little Easter egg for someone in the clan each episode or something that makes me laugh (or cry).
After I collect the footage, I open it up and review it, seeing how much unbroken game play I can string together. I review the footage, usually playing it at double speed or more to look for any glitches or things I don’t want to make the audience sit through. Then I split the clips together with natural cuts in the action, usually fading to black between them since it’s the transition I’ve figured out and works reliably.
Then after putting it all together, I rend out the video file which went from 6 hours on my first try down to just under an hour once I better understood what I was doing. Then it’s time to upload to Youtube. That’s an adventure in itself. I have no idea how long it will ever take to upload. Sometimes it’s an hour. Other times it’s multiple hours. It loves to sit at 95% for a seemingly random amount of time.
Once it’s up there, it’s time to name it, add in the show notes from the podcast page, tag it as a podcast, add it’s gaming footage with the hopes it’ll catch someone’s eye or get picked up in a search and then go to sleep since it’s usually between 1 and 2am when I do this. I try to get the show up on Youtube as close as I can to when the podcast gets released.
If you’ve stuck with me this far. This is all to say, I am doing a Destiny podcast. It’s a lot of fun. It’s made me appreciate the game and my friendship with my co-hosts all the more. I look forward to sitting down to talk with them every week and I hope at least some of that comes across in the show. As much grief as Nitedemon (the suave British voice of reason) and No1RespawnsinRL (guaranteed to be angrier on a random Tuesday than you ever will be in your entire life) give each other. We love this show and playing together.
If you are interested at all, you can find our show on Podbean. It will give you the RSS feed to put into your podcatcher. We’re on iTunes, PocketCasts, Overcast, Spotify, and Youtube. Search for “Two Titans and a Hunter” and you’ll find us in your audio purveyor of choice.
Most of you will roll your eyes or skip this post entirely because who cares about a gaming podcast to a game you don’t play. It’s OK. I fully expect most of you to be the Merlin Mann to my John Siracusa. And that’s OK. Because we don’t all have to like the same things. This is my little thing and it’s been a ton of fun to make.
